What's in it for me? Investigating the role of utility and involvement in consumer digital piracy
4. Discussion and implications
This study attempted to generate new insights into digital piracy by proposing and empirically testing a specific model of consumer behaviour on a heterogeneous sample of adult population. We identified two variables (pirated content utility and legal content utility) that influence consumer intention to pirate digital content, and one variable (film/music involvement) that moderates these relationships. Interestingly, while several studies on counterfeiting raise the issue of interaction between counterfeited and legal products (e.g., Commuri, 2009; Penz & Stöttinger, 2008), surprisingly little research effort has been devoted to simultaneous examination of pirated and legal digital content (e.g., Hennig-Thurau,
Henning, & Sattler, 2007). This study tries to fill this gap, while it also introduces film/music involvement as an influential moderating variable. In this way we also respond to calls of de Matos, Ituassu and Rossi (2007) inviting researchers to investigate the role of involvement as a moderator. In our piece of research, the involvement construct focuses specifically on film and music, which has been also supported by the sample characteristics. Namely, respondents reported music (78% of the content) and movie files (17% of the content) as the most
frequently downloaded content.
Our findings suggest that the intention to pirate digital content is significantly influenced by two factors: pirated content utility and legal content utility. These two factors play pivotal roles in shaping digital piracy intentions, and thus need to be considered in future (anti)piracy activities. As hypothesised, an individual’s expectation of benefiting from obtaining pirated digital content leads to increased tendency to engage in digital piracy. Conversely, perception
6 of benefits from obtaining legal content seems to reduce the individual’s tendency to pirate digital content. These findings corroborate previous empirical work, especially in the well- researched domain of pirated content utility/benefits. For example, Wang and McClung (2011) show that the utility of pirated content related to costs and convenience positively predicts consumers’ intentions to pirate in the future. Similarly, Hennig-Thurau, Henning, and Sattler (2007) find that specific utilities a consumer derives from an illegal copy correlate positively with obtainment and watching of illegal copies. The implications of our results for the affected industries aiming to deter consumers from digital piracy, are two-fold, i.e. they have to either reduce the utility of pirated content or increase the utility of legal content. The first has already been implemented by industry associations which use two main approaches:
graduate response (e.g. notifications to digital pirates, followed by sanctions, such as temporal account suspension, bandwidth throttling or fines) and website blocking measures (IFPI, 2012). The second has to be made clearer to the end consumers, who may fail to see the connection between legal downloading and showing support for the artist/industry, which also influences the output of the industry.
In addition to examining the determinants of the intention to pirate digital content, we also provide insight into the moderating role of consumer involvementin the film and music product category. Our analysis provides support for the negative impact of film/music
involvement on the relationship between pirated content utility as perceived by the consumer and their future intention to pirate. More specifically, in situations when consumers are highly involved in film/music, the influence of pirated content utility on intention is not as strong as in situations of low involvement. However, the moderating role of involvement on the legal content utility-intention relationship seems to be negligible.
While several limitations apply to this cross-sectional survey based study conducted in a single country, its findings provide avenues for further research. In developing and testing our model, we merely included two sets of utilities as drivers of consumer intentions to pirate digital content, resulting in 50.7% of explained variance (adjusted R2)in intention to pirate digital content. Extending these two sets of utilities to include not only other types of utilities (e.g., Kinnally, Lacayo, McClung, and Sapolsky, 2008; Wang & McClung, 2011), but also various types of perceived costs (e.g., Hennig-Thurau, Henning, & Sattler, 2007) would offer deeper insights into factors underlying downloading in utility theory based piracy studies . We hope the results of this research nevertheless offer a springboard for future investigations in this field.
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Channel Relationship Quality in Exchanges: a Systematic Literature Review Approach
NAMÉRCIO CUNHA (UNIVERSITY OF AVEIRO)
Co-author(s): Sandra Loureiro (ISCTE-IUL Business School) / Arménio Rego (University of Aveiro )
Access to this paper is restricted to registered delegates of the EMAC 2013 Regional Conference.
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